Green Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
100 free Green trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Green is the colour of living things, of money, of envy and of going. It is the pigment that feeds the planet, the patina on famous statues, the shade of the rarest human eyes and the reason a whole island got a misleading name. It turns up in a liqueur that named a colour, in a ballpark wall, in a golf jacket, in paper money and in the flags of half the world. These 100 questions run the whole spectrum: the science behind green leaves and green gases, green places on the map, the green-skinned and green-clad heroes of comics and television, green songs and green films, green food and drink, green teams and green politics. Every one is cited to an encyclopaedia or reference page, and each explanation adds the detail that makes the answer worth remembering. It suits a themed pub quiz, a St Patrick's Day or Earth Day party, a classroom warm-up or a family night in. Play it on your phone with instant feedback, or print the list and read it aloud.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which metal, oxidising into a verdigris patina after 1900, gives the Statue of Liberty its colour?
Copper
Copper oxidised into the patina that spread across the statue shortly after 1900, and Congress, taking it for corrosion, voted money to paint the whole thing before being talked out of it.
Q 02Which football team, founded in 1959 as the Titans, switched to green and white in 1963 under another name?
New York Jets
The New York Jets were named for the jet age and for their new home, Shea Stadium, between LaGuardia and Idlewild airports, and dropped the Titans' blue and gold for green and white.
Q 03Most 'wasabi' paste served outside Japan is a dyed mixture based on which cheaper root vegetable?
Horseradish
Horseradish, mustard, starch and green food colouring or spinach powder make up the usual substitute, while real wasabi is grated from a plant in the same family as mustard.
Q 04The green sea turtle takes its name from the colour of which part of the animal, rather than its olive-to-black shell?
Its body fat
Its body fat is green, a colour usually credited to the adults' diet of seagrass and algae, and it lies in a layer between the inner organs and the shell.
Q 05Which English king is popularly but wrongly credited with composing the folk tune 'Greensleeves'?
Henry VIII
Henry VIII gets the credit by myth alone; the ballad was first registered in London in 1580, more than thirty years after his death, and the tune is used as a motif in SIX, the musical about his wives.
Q 06Green is the rarest of the common human eye colours, at about 2% of people; which is the most common worldwide?
Brown
Brown eyes belong to well over half of humanity, while green eyes contain no green pigment at all: a little melanin plus light scattered in the iris produces the colour.
Q 07In which 1925 novel does the narrator watch his neighbour reach toward a green light at the end of a dock?
The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby ends with Nick staring across the bay at the light on Daisy's dock, the image Fitzgerald turns into his closing line about boats borne back into the past.
Q 08Which US state has an official State Question, 'Red or green?', about the chile sauce on a dish?
New Mexico
New Mexico is the only state with an official question, and the official answer, 'Christmas', means red and green chile on the same plate.
Q 09Which fruit, once sold as the Chinese gooseberry, got its modern name from its exporters in 1959?
Kiwifruit
Kiwifruit reached New Zealand in 1904 as seeds that a school principal, Isabel Fraser, carried home from China, and Turners & Growers renamed it to suit the American market.
Q 10Starbucks, whose green logo shows a twin-tailed siren, is named after the chief mate in which seafaring novel?
Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick's chief mate Starbuck came to mind when co-founder Gordon Bowker read the name 'Starbo' on an old mining map, after the founders went looking for a strong name starting with 'st'.
Q 11Which tennis tournament, the oldest in the world, uses dark green and purple as its official colours?
Wimbledon
Wimbledon's own radio station has opened with a theme called 'Purple and Green', composed by Tony Cox, since 1996.
Q 12Which ballpark's 37-foot left-field wall, covered in tin and concrete in 1934, is nicknamed the Green Monster?
Fenway Park
Fenway Park's wall is wood underneath, and in 1934 owner Tom Yawkey also flattened the sloping 'Duffy's Cliff' that fielders had to climb in front of it.
Q 13Which island nation, uninhabited until Portuguese settlers came in the 1400s, is named after a Senegalese peninsula?
Cape Verde
Q 21Which anise-flavoured spirit, nicknamed 'the green fairy', was banned in France and the United States by 1915?
Absinthe
Absinthe, la fée verte in French, has never been shown to be more dangerous than ordinary spirits, and the bans swept the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria-Hungary too.
Q 22In snooker, the green ball is worth three points, one more than which ball potted just before it?
Yellow
Yellow is worth two points and opens the final run through the colours, in a game first played by British Army officers in India with 22 balls on the table.
Q 23Which American country singer wrote 'Forty Shades of Green' during a 1959 visit to Ireland?
Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash first released the song in 1961 as the B-side of 'The Rebel–Johnny Yuma', and it later landed on his Ring of Fire best-of collection.
Cape Verde takes its name from Cap-Vert, 'green cape', the peninsula at Dakar that is mainland Africa's westernmost point, which Portuguese explorers named a few years before they found the islands.
Q 14Which metal sits at the centre of the chlorophyll molecule, as iron does in the haem of blood?
Magnesium
Magnesium sits at the heart of every chlorophyll molecule, which is why spinach and other leafy green vegetables supply so much of it in the diet.
Q 15Which martial artist played Kato, the masked hero's valet and partner, in ABC's 1966 series The Green Hornet?
Bruce Lee
Bruce Lee's series lasted a single season in America, but it was such a hit in Hong Kong, where it was known as The Kato Show, that it opened the way to his film career.
Q 16At which store chain's lunch counter did four Black students begin the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins?
Woolworth's
Woolworth's Greensboro store is now the International Civil Rights Center and Museum, and the protests led the chain to drop its segregation policy across the South.
Q 17US paper money nicknamed 'greenbacks' for its green reverse was first issued as emergency currency during which war?
American Civil War
The American Civil War notes were fiat money, made legal tender by Congress in February 1862 but unusable for customs duties or interest on the public debt.
Q 18Which knight of the Round Table beheads a mysterious Green Knight, who then picks up his head and sets a return blow?
Sir Gawain
Sir Gawain must seek the Green Knight a year and a day later to take the return blow, a 'beheading game' motif that first appears in the 8th-century Irish tale Bricriu's Feast.
Q 19Which film famously lost the Best Picture Oscar to How Green Was My Valley, John Ford's 1941 Welsh mining drama?
Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane lost to a film that took five of its ten nominations; the novel's author Richard Llewellyn, who claimed the story came from his own life, turned out to be English-born and to have spent little time in Wales.
Q 20Which French liqueur, made by Carthusian monks from 130 plants, gave its name to a yellow-green colour?
Chartreuse
Chartreuse gets its colour from a final maceration of plants, and the full recipe is known only to a handful of the monks who make it.
Q 24Which singer took 'Green, Green Grass of Home', learned from a Jerry Lee Lewis record, to number one in 1966?
Tom Jones
Tom Jones found the record at Colony Records in New York while in town for The Ed Sullivan Show; Curly Putman wrote the song and Porter Wagoner first made it a country hit.
Q 25Which Memphis instrumental group recorded 'Green Onions' in 1962, first issued as a B-side on the Volt label?
Booker T. & the M.G.'s
Booker T. & the M.G.'s were the Stax house band, with Steve Cropper on guitar, Al Jackson on drums and Lewie Steinberg on bass behind Jones's organ.
Q 26Which band released 'Green River', a song about a childhood holiday spot, as a single in July 1969?
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Creedence Clearwater Revival put the single out a month before the album of the same name, and Cash Box ranked it the number 19 single of 1969.
Q 27Which Sesame Street composer wrote 'Bein' Green' for Kermit the Frog, a song later covered by Frank Sinatra?
Joe Raposo
Joe Raposo's song reached Sinatra's 1971 album Sinatra & Company, and that recording came back to Sesame Street under an animated insert by Étienne Delessert.
Q 28Which wealthy Star City businessman is the secret identity of DC Comics' archer hero Green Arrow?
Oliver Queen
Oliver Queen was killed off in the 1990s and replaced by his son Connor Hawke, then brought back in the 2001 'Quiver' storyline written by Kevin Smith.
Q 29Which agronomist, the 'father of the Green Revolution', won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for raising food supplies?
Norman Borlaug
Norman Borlaug bred tough dwarf wheat in Mexico, and after India and Pakistan planted it in the 1960s their wheat yields nearly doubled between 1965 and 1970.
Q 30Which Cornish attraction, built in a reclaimed china-clay pit, houses one of the world's largest indoor rainforests?
Eden Project
The Eden Project's larger biome simulates a rainforest and its second a Mediterranean climate, and the whole site took two and a half years to build.